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EPITAPH FOR KELLS GARDENS: IN MEDIAS RES
The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

EPITAPH FOR KELLS GARDENS: IN MEDIAS RES

by
August 21, 2023
Interior (My Dining Room), Wassily Kandinsky, 1909

H. K. G. Lowery  is a writer & musician from…

Aeneas walked through that door almost daily, for twenty-two years, or more. Two locks now keep another family safe; ruby-red curtains are no longer drawn after nights at Aunty Kathleen's; trees project on opaque panels, like slides, from lampposts in dusk; and the porch light: an angel never noticed. Aeneas leaves every memory: Anchises and Venus, still in love, drinking Chianti and Gavi, smoking Silk Cut cigarettes, cooking roast dinners on Sunday afternoons to James Taylor; hat dining room: the Sacred Heart statue, the broken cuckoo clock bought in Interlaken; grandchildren with grandparents watched parents party on wine-stained wood …years later, they don't sing Dancing in the Moonlight, those grandparents are gone, and each grandchild is Paris becoming Priam. Aeneas wanders Troy troubled by nostalgia: adolescent sorrow, bad girlfriends; happiest for sleepovers, Pokémon, and football down the lane. Aeneas knew the creek of each hinge like his bones, the weight of the wood like his muscle, the wallpaper like his skin. For the final time, Aeneas closed that door, the sound of it shutting like never before; walls naked, stripped of photographs, losing the echoes of all the laughs, quarrels, and songs snapping into silence as Aeneas turned to Troy with tear-filled eyes, saying sad goodbyes on that sunless day in July.
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H. K. G. Lowery  is a writer & musician from Gateshead. He gained a Distinction in his Masters degree in Creative Writing from Graduate College, Lancaster University, where he worked with Paul Muldoon, Paul Farley & Terry Eagleton. The Department of English Literature & Creative Writing awarded him with the 2021/2022 Portfolio Prize for his work which received the highest mark in the faculty. Lowery has been shortlisted for The Bedford International Award & The Terry Kelly Poetry Prize, & his publications include: An Enquiry into the Delight of Existence and the Sublime  (AMP, 2020), Being and Becoming  (KDP, 2021), Death, And Other Angels  (Errant, 2022) & 9:45 Drama  (KDP, 2022). Lowery has recently been published in Poetry Salzburg , Amsterdam Quarterly &  Pennine Platform.

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